Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

And it might still have worked out between them. In due course he might have sought her out again, might have followed her to the commune, gotten down on one knee, and humbly asked Rom to give him a free lute lesson. After a potluck dinner, around a bonfire, Susan might have played the tambourine and sung songs about the giving spirit of trees while he and Rom accompanied her on twin lutes.

And Casey: Casey might have been born in a yurt with a midwife attending, instead of by emergency C-section at the UCLA Medical Center. When she was seventeen she might not have gone driving at all, in that snowstorm in the suburbs of Denver. She might have had different friends, might not have even have decided impulsively that she wanted to learn to ski, wanted to take her turn on the baby slopes, and therefore never have asked Hal and Susan if she could go on a Colorado ski trip with her L.A. friends, who in addition to skiing enjoyed drinking games and fast driving. She might have been, say, more of a horseback-rider type, competed in horse-riding meets in a black velvet cap and tall boots, and had different friends entirely, who knew, friends who did Outward Bound courses or line dancing, friends who won prizes at the county fair for growing outsize tomatoes.

But instead he had followed one urge, a single urge. What was an urge but a quick pulse of energy through the brain? He had followed a jealous, self-protective urge and consecrated his behavior to persuasion. For two or three weeks his attention had been focused entirely on preventing Susan from leaving — on preventing his future wife from realizing her dream.

And that petty urge of self-protection, that small urge that passed through him in seconds, had determined the future for all three of them.

As soon as his taxi pulled up alongside the curb outside the small police station he saw the building was locked up tight as a drum, lights off. He got out to check the sign on the door — a paper clock with the hands stuck at seven and twelve — while a streetlight above him flickered and buzzed.

“I don’t understand,” he said to the driver as he got back in. “What about the jail, then? There has to be some kind of holding cells, at least. Supervised by police. Do you know where that would be?”

The driver shrugged and shook his head.

“But what if there are crimes committed? And someone, you know, a criminal does something and needs to be arrested? I mean, no one commits crimes after the end of the workday?”

“You come back in the morning,” said the driver, nodding. He had an accent like the harelip cadet: maybe Garifuna. “I take you to a nice hotel. Your friend be OK. Don’t worry.”

The hotel had iron gates and a fountain playing in the front garden; its lobby was empty save for a clerk at the long counter, who found him a room right away.

“Maybe you can tell me,” said Hal. “The police. What do you do if you have to call the police in the middle of the night?”

“We’ve never had to call the police,” said the night clerk, smiling. “We have a quality clientele.”

“I’m sure you do. But let’s say something happened — a break-in. Something like that.”

“Yes sir, I would report it first thing in the morning,” said the desk clerk.

Hal was exasperated. There was no way. Was the man ill-informed, or was it Hal who was wrong? There was no way to know.

In his room, which was small and so cloying he had to open a window immediately, the clock radio read 1:15. He sat down on the bed and took his phone card out of his wallet, keyed in the long sequence.

She picked up after a single ring.

“Hal?”

“Sorry to wake you.”

“Actually I couldn’t sleep. I called the resort and they said you guys were gone, both of you.”

“I had to charter a flight to the city. They arrested him.”

While he explained what he thought had happened he was preoccupied with himself — himself and the free love. What to say next, about the rest of it, the rest of their lives and whether there was a future? He was bound up in the saga, his own concerns.

“Suze,” he said suddenly. “I know it’s my fault. I don’t blame you.”

“Your fault?”

“I realized, this trip, how I’ve been preoccupied for so long. I’m always feeling regret. I go around in a daze. . years now, Suze. For years. But I know it at least. I’ve seen it now. I mean I already knew it, rationally, but I hadn’t. .”

“It’s all right, Hal. You don’t have to apologize. Please.”

“But you’ve been. . I mean, I think somewhere in there I may have left you alone.”

She was quiet. He had the window open, and a palm was waving. Outside he heard a car swish down the empty street. Had it rained? They were both alone now. She was alone because years ago he had left her for an idea of loss; he was alone because he had chosen it, without even knowing. He was afloat in the world, its vast and empty spaces. . far away from his wife and his little girl, in a foreign city where not one person knew him. A silent, sweltering city in a subtropical country, toward the equator, toward the South Pole, toward the black place in the sky around which all the stars seemed to spin.

He was awake in the warm night, alone, while everyone else was sleeping.

The walls of the room felt closer than they were, covered in a dark-red-and-white-striped wallpaper like Christmas wrapping. Beneath his legs, the bed’s coverlet was scratchy. Susan always stripped the coverlets off hotel beds as soon as she got into the hotel room. She said they were unhygienic — that hotels never washed them and they were the repositories of bodily secretions and pathogens. In the main she was not too uptight about germs, but when it came to hotel coverlets she made no exceptions.

“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said gently, after a while. “OK? I mean the phone isn’t the best for this, you know. This kind of conversation.”

“I just want to know if we’re going to be all right. If we’re going to get through it.” He waited for a second, then got up restlessly, holding the receiver. The red wallpaper was closing in.

The cord barely stretched but he made it to the window, gazed through the silhouettes of fronds onto the dark street. She was not answering. The silence was ominous. His stomach turned. “Or if you want to, you know, leave me. And be with that. .”

He let it trail off. Damned if he would say more.

The wait made his stomach lurch again.

“Be with—? Oh. No, no, no, it’s nothing like that, sweetheart. It’s not, you know. Anything important.”

“I see,” he said, nodding invisibly.

He felt lighter, though at the same time his skin prickled with a faint annoyance. It was not important to her, yet for it she risked everything: for a trivial fuck, or series of fucks, she had done this to him. But he should count his blessings. They were still married. It seemed they would probably continue to be. His home was still his home, his wife was still his wife. She was not trying to get away from him. On and on, as always, it would keep being the three of them, him and her and Casey.

“I mean, that’s a relief to me. Of course.”

He felt almost off the hook, now that he knew. Now that he knew, the familiar was coming back. Already — he felt it — already the strangeness of life was receding. He heard something in the background — was it here or in the background in L.A., across the many miles? No; it was here, it was outside the window. A siren, but different from the sirens he was used to, slower and tinnier. No surprise: in a foreign country the sound of a siren was bound to be a variation on the familiar theme, not an exact replica.